Rohan Rivett (1917 - 1977) was born in Melbourne. He was the son of the distinguished scientist David Rivett and a grandson of Alfred Deakin. He studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford before joining the Argus newspaper in 1939 as a journalist. He was a war correspondent in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942, and survived as a prisoner-of-war for more than three years. Rivett returned to journalism after the war and later became a director of News Limited and a director of the International Press Institute, Zurich. He published several non-fiction books and a biography of his father.